Just kidding, just wanted the forum to start discussing things again. I'm working on a new story idea, but it definitely will remain under wraps for a while. Hope everything is well amongst the community.

What do you want to discuss...? TBH everything's died down a bit since helios stopped posting. Has anyone seen him around?

I've had a few ideas for levels but I never really have anytime to do anything due to being crazy busy at university. I'll join discussions, but can't really contribute anything, Again, huge thanks to FluXy for actually making time to keep working on this. No one else here seems to have any.

"Plants need to have water poured on them because they have no hands to hold glasses of water."

BowserJr wrote:What do you want to discuss...? TBH everything's died down a bit since helios stopped posting. Has anyone seen him around?

Still alive and kicking. We just bought a new house, moved, got a puppy from the pound and are organizing for a three family Christmas reunion at our new place so things have been a little, uh, crazy to say the least! The satelite internet at our new place unfortunately is also crazy slow (think pining for the good ol' days of 56k modems here)

I've got some images I've been tinkering away on, but just need to finish off before posting. Ah here's a solution:

House hunting - Now that's something I will be experiencing in the next few days. We just got our offer put together and submitted today. I've got to run by the bank later today and start getting loan stuff taken care of. With the housing market in the US right now, I am so glad my wife and I have got good credit and are financially doing well. Congrats on the house and puppy and everything.

OK, I just had one idea for a story: Mike (Maryo sounds too much like Mario) live in a big city. Every day he gets fast food and Mike hates that stuff. So he gets out in the wild in a secret mission to get real food like apples, pears, bananas, mushrooms, cookie and all that stuff.

These food would replace coins. It would differ with the theme, put same color means same quality. For example: A green apple, a green melon and a green gummy bear give 1 Point. Yellow food gives 2 and red food 5 points. Powerups are food too, but same in all themes. We don't want to confuse the player too much. The evil mushroom will be replaced with evil food like Donuts, Hamburger or Licorice.

Real Life? I think this would get too much politics. Especially with my background, because I'm in a NGO who help handicapped people.

Seriously though, for some reason this idea strikes me too much as cheesy fan game territory. By copying Mario ideas, we have a very professional feeling game, and I don't want to ruin that, even if it will make the game less Nintendo-y. Don't really know if we can change the ideas while still maintaining the professional feel...

Attachments

Secret Sportacus Chronicles! Don't know why I made this picture. It's not like I don't have loads to be doing right now, but I wanted to last time, and I couldn't miss the chance again!

Back to work...

jump_right.png (137.6 KiB) Viewed 13651 times

"Plants need to have water poured on them because they have no hands to hold glasses of water."

An easy way to replace the goldpiece with could be a diamond (SNES Zelda like) this only needs 1 image and the sparkle animation could be created random ingame or colored diamonds could be 5, 10 or 20 goldpieces.

Old but still fitting discussion about new powerups here.
Exotic fruits are preferred since they add a mystical/magic feeling.

If i didn't read your post but it was important you can send me a PM.Any Donation will help this project!

I'm sure games had coins as a collectable even before SMB, and still do today. It's such a generic element, I don't see why it needs to change. The "grab mushroom-> grow big" "grab flower -> shoot fire" seems much more iffy to me...

"Plants need to have water poured on them because they have no hands to hold glasses of water."

I like where all this is going. I think the fruits would be great - I'll try and start working up some sketches in the next few days to see what I can come up with.

On a happy note: I just got done IM-ing with Helios! Looks like SVN has been a pain and he's been really busy, so he's going to try to email me all the SVGs he has and I will post them on SVN on his behalf. So, looks like Krunch, Buzz, and other characters are not dead - just in stasis. He says he'll try and ween himself back on to the forum over the next little while. So when you see him, give him a big hello.

A single rotting hand bursts forth from the ground... A low groan and murmur can be heard.... Is it a half dead zombie? Some dark creature of the night? No, it's Helios back from the grave...

Hi all,

Sorry for that rather nasty case of RL setting in. Our house in the country that we just moved to is wonderful, however SVN+satelite internet is just super nasty. Anyway, I've got most of the SVG's I've already worked on in a tar.gz at http://piersduruz.com/maryo_files.tar.gz (including the overworld ones). For some reason FTP seems to work much better here (I'm guessing because the data is in large one way bursts).

Congratulations everyone on hitting apc#1 and 3/4 of a *million* downloads! woah....

OK, I think a have a better story: Maryo (or whatever we call him) want a new place to live. To get a goverment-flat it can take a while (I'm waiting for 3 years!) and nobody want to lend him any money. So he get out in the wild and hunts for anything that can be sold. He start with a dog kennel and with every level he complete his house is growing to a Mansion.

This is quite a simple story. I know no game with this goal, so it is no standard like "save kipnapped XY". And it seems like many people can identify with this goal. Coins would fit in this story, but fruits for powerups would be nice. On the other side we need graphics for the houses and much programming. But this can be done with Version 2.3 or something like that.

===========Secret Maryo Chronicals: A New Hope, er, "The Story Begins"=====================

Maryo was spending time with his good friend Gnushi and Gnushi's kids in the happy, happy forest where all the cute, fluffy bunnykins play. Suddenly the forest went dark and all the bunnykins started to shake with fright! In a puff of magic the evil Growler appeared from nowhere. Growler laughed "Bwah hahahahaha! You'll not stop me this time Maryo! Now I have the {new magical power} I need only one thing to take over the happy, happy forest / world and become invincible forever!". A powerful beam of magic shot from Growler's staff holding Maryo in place with a circle of glowing light. "And what's that?" Maryo asked to which Growler laughed "Your best friend!". Straight away two of Growler's flying bad guys flew down grabbing Gnushi. "Maryo helllllp!" called Gnushi as Growler and his henchmen flew off into the distance.

A moment later the magic ring of light disappeared freeing Maryo. "Bwahhhhhhhh!" bawled Gnushi's children. "We want our Dad back! Why did Growler kidnap him?". "I don't know" said Maryo, thinking "but I've got a feeling I need to find out if I'm going to save the happy, happy forest!". "Don't worry kids! We'll get your Dad back in no time, and save the Forest, too!" he said. "You mean it?" they sniffed. "Absolutely!" beamed Maryo. "Yay! We'll run ahead and hide, so we can help you on your quest!" they squealed. "Good idea!" said Maryo.

We then have an excuse for {Yoshi replacement} look-a-likes (the kids) to be hidden all over the place, an evil boss and the usual kidnapping in a way that won't disgust any women along the lines of "Peach got kidnapped again?!". It's also close enough to a Mario stroyline to get Nintendo's lawyers worried and sickeningly cute / formula enough to be a Mario story, too. Possibly a little bit too cute... but then it could always be the happy, happy, happy forest...

This'd all be pretty easy to draw / animate in 2d as well I'd say and voices could be text boxes unless people installed the music pack in which case they got to hear Fluxy as Maryo and BowserJr as Growler. I guess that leaves YoungHeart to do Gnushi's voice and I'd be...the kids?!

I was thinking yesterday, and I mean this in the nicest possible way, I haven't missed your contributions as much as I've missed your humour. I actually laughed out loud (and a lot of people use that acronym erroneously) at the idea of me voicing Growler. I HAVE to record some Growler voice samples later! *excited*

*Slightly more* seriously though, I love the name Gnushi, for its GNU reference. This name has to make it into the game! And Bunnykins should be in there somewhere too, but they're blatantly Toads. The story sounds great, although Yoshi's Story had a "Super Happy Tree", so you might want to change that...

I'm using big smilies because reading that post has made me hyper. I hope you're happy.

"Plants need to have water poured on them because they have no hands to hold glasses of water."

I have just played Super Mario Galaxy. I've landed on a small glass-planet filled with water. In this planet are 3 tennisballs and 1 melon. The goal ist to stomp on the planet to put the balls into the melon, so it grows, break the glas and give you a power star.